Linux n00b here. Going to try Linux for my dedicated folding@home rigs. Think I am going to try Xubuntu. Now the question is. What can I use to test for CPU stability. Are there any Linpack stress testers available? Also what is a good program to read CPU core temperatures?

I've tried Xubuntu and Ubuntu in the past for folding rigs. 8.04, 8.10, 9.04. IMHO, Ubuntu was a little easier to get going, seems to recognize more hardware off the bat. This may have been fixed with the most recent releases. Easiest thing to do is boot to the live CD, see how it works with your hardware. If it sees everything, then do the full install.

For Linux I can't see why using Wine and LinX won't work and the same for CoreTemp.

There does appear to be SOME utilities out there tho not to sure how they'll work.

I can confirm most open source/freeware stress tests work well enough through Wine. All the Crystalmarks, OCCT, (is usually the most buggy though) prime95, LinX.

Otherwise your only choice is to use a dedicated stress testing distro like Stresslinux, there really aren't very many stability tests for Linux, no BSODs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SugarJ

I've tried Xubuntu and Ubuntu in the past for folding rigs. 8.04, 8.10, 9.04. IMHO, Ubuntu was a little easier to get going, seems to recognize more hardware off the bat. This may have been fixed with the most recent releases. Easiest thing to do is boot to the live CD, see how it works with your hardware. If it sees everything, then do the full install.

The two distros are essentially the same, they just use a different desktop environment targeted towards different users/systems. Xubuntu is intended for older systems with lower spec hardware, which may be why it didn't detect certain hardware automatically. There shouldn't be any hardware issues as long as you're not using ATI/AMD (which has still come a long way) or a lot of non legacy USB devices.

If you want to tweak your OS to be fairly lightweight, I would install Ubuntu and then change it to Lubuntu/Xubuntu for simplicity. Otherwise you'll be getting into specialty distros like Puppy Linux and DSL.

EDIT: BTW I hope it's not going on the SR-2, don't think the driver support would be all that good. Though I could be totally wrong.

I can confirm most open source/freeware stress tests work well enough through Wine. All the Crystalmarks, OCCT, (is usually the most buggy though) prime95, LinX.

Otherwise your only choice is to use a dedicated stress testing distro like Stresslinux, there really aren't very many stability tests for Linux, no BSODs.

The two distros are essentially the same, they just use a different desktop environment targeted towards different users/systems. Xubuntu is intended for older systems with lower spec hardware, which may be why it didn't detect certain hardware automatically. There shouldn't be any hardware issues as long as you're not using ATI/AMD (which has still come a long way) or a lot of non legacy USB devices.

If you want to tweak your OS to be fairly lightweight, I would install Ubuntu and then change it to Lubuntu/Xubuntu for simplicity.

EDIT: BTW I hope it's not going on the SR-2, don't think the driver support would be all that good. Though I could be totally wrong.

Thanks for the post. Actually yes I do plan on throwing it on both of the SR-2s. The only drivers I care for are the ethernet drivers. They won't even have a display hooked up as I'll just VNC in to them if need be. If I can't get Xubuntu to work properly I'll try something else.

Thanks for the post. Actually yes I do plan on throwing it on both of the SR-2s. The only drivers I care for are the ethernet drivers. They won't even have a display hooked up as I'll just VNC in to them if need be. If I can't get Xubuntu to work properly I'll try something else.

Only concern would be NUMA support, IIRC most of the Ubuntu distros leave it out by default. (though I'm unsure about Kubuntu) It wouldn't hurt to try though, it's just a little bit of wasted bandwidth/time. If you do find one that works, but don't like the weight of the OS, you can just change it afterwards.

Linux distros meant for clusters or commercial use usually have it, but I don't think F@H works on clusters (since it's a cluster in itself) and using a commercial/enterprise distro might be a huge inconvenience in terms of tech support.

Linux n00b here. Going to try Linux for my dedicated folding@home rigs. Think I am going to try Xubuntu. Now the question is. What can I use to test for CPU stability. Are there any Linpack stress testers available? Also what is a good program to read CPU core temperatures?